Frances to Armando and others... You have injected the category of aesthetics, which is okay and can be discussed, but my prior message dealt with artistic issues. In any event and whether the umbrella is aesthetic or artistic, the question of knowing art to be only good, or of knowing art to be bad or good, would remain. My tentative escape is to classify art as being fine art and liberal art and applied art, and then relegate bad art of any kind to that of applied art and there as craft. It would be my tentative contention therefore that art as fine art can only be good, otherwise it is applied art and craft or it reverts to being an ordinary object of nonart. All art of course is an aesthetic object and will bear or have aesthetic properties like beauty to some degree, but not all aesthetic objects are artistic objects. This is to hold that aesthetic objects can be natural aesthetic objects or cultural aesthetic objects, and that cultural aesthetic objects would include say objects of religion and art. The question nonetheless remains as to whether an object found or held to be any kind of art might then be agreed or deemed as bad art or as nonart if the determination is warranted or justified by some learned group of normal experts. In other words, simply because any individual person calls themselves an artist and then calls their made object an artwork does not necessarily make the object art let alone good art. The individual person alone after all may be sick or evil, and their work perverted or demented, and thus bad as art.
Armando wrote... You do agree that under the umbrella of aesthetics there is good and bad art, made by all levels of minds. Frances wrote... No person need likely be educated to be artistic or to be an artist or to posit good artworks. The individual person alone however cannot determine this, because they may be suffering a deluded illusion. Only a group of normal peers therefore can tentatively determine if any of this is true. This raises an issue as to whether the nice crafts of perverts and deviants and maniacs should be held deemed as bad art or rather as applied art or as ordinary objects of say kitsch or simply as nonart. To call bad art at least as fine art at all seems to be wrong somehow. The potential artifices and artifacts and artiforms as artworks therefore will grow from being ordinary nonart or applied art to becoming extraordinary fine art by the natural process of evolution. Such growth entails adeptive chance and adaptive change and adoptive choice. The overall direction of an aspiring artist therefore leans toward a good end goal, although many of the exploratory paths and routes may be bad or wrong and evil. The correction must however lay with the normal group of learned experts. Armando wrote... I don't think art follows the process of evolution into goodness, but more likely the process of change into variations of it.
